Ice Cap

by Chris Knopf

  “Sure,” I wrote. “You can do that?”

  “As long as my friend remains my friend,” he replied.

  “So stay friendly,” I wrote.

  I hadn’t allowed myself to react when UB first reported Zina’s nonidentity. UB was likely a clever cyber-warrior, but still an amateur. Interpol was different. Way different. You don’t hide from those guys.

  That was why I had to ask Randall. To hear that news. I knew it was coming, and though I didn’t know where it would lead, from then on all things would have to be different.

  * * *

  “What do you know about Ivor Fleming?” I asked Roger Angstrom when he answered the phone.

  “What do I know or what do I know that I can print?”

  “What do you know.”

  “He has a very successful, legitimate scrap-metal business, collecting product from all over the East Coast, separating it by type of metal, more or less, and shipping it all around the world. His biggest customers have traditionally been sheet-metal fabricators serving the auto and appliance industries. Originally in Japan and Western Europe, now most of it goes to China, Brazil, and Korea.”

  “That’s all printable. Tell me what’s not.”

  “In return for what?” he asked.

  A short list of options leapt to mind. “I’ll give you an exclusive on the Buczek case. Once it’s concluded.”

  “In your favor or not?” he asked.

  “Either way is in my favor. All I’m striving for is the truth.”

  “I can’t talk about this over the phone,” he said. “We’ll have to meet. Tonight?”

  “You know where I am. Mr. Sato will ring when you get here.”

  * * *

  Among the infinite number of things one can do with the computer is not only check the weather report, but actually see the weather bearing down on you in lush, representational colors. You only need to go to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Web site and look. These are the people who tell everyone else in the country what’s going to happen, maybe, in the coming days. Unless something changes. That morning it was telling us on the East End that all the ferocious winter weather we’d been experiencing was just a prelude, a warm-up if you will, to what was coming later that week.

  Of course, it also might miss us. Or it might hit us square between the eyes. No one knew for certain, breathless warnings from the attractive local newscasters notwithstanding.

  Yeah, yeah, was all us jaded and irritable Long Islanders could think. Heard it all, seen it all before, and we’re all still here. Wake us up when Armageddon is really coming to town and maybe we’ll give it a little attention.

  For my part, I had the outfit, finally. Everything warm, rugged, and resistant to overuse. My car drove like a snowmobile and there was limitless sashimi and green tea one flight down. We’d never lost power in the building, and even if that happened, there was always Burton’s place, which was set up to live off the grid through anything short of thermonuclear war.

  But I studied the giant Doppler radar map anyway and began to be impressed with all the green. Green, incongruously, meant heavy snowfall. At that moment, a lot of green was dumping on the western reaches of the South. As usual, the wind currents were projected to bring that monster over West Virginia, Maryland, and South Jersey, across a little scrap of the Atlantic Ocean, and then broadside into Long Island.

  As far as I could tell from their projections, Southampton was predicted to be smack in the middle of the storm.

  Oh, goody.

  I noticed a little gadget on the site that let me zoom in on the projected center of the storm to see how it would be distributed across all the area villages and hamlets. It was driven by a version of Google Earth, so you could see all the real roads, buildings, and bodies of water.

  It was at that moment I was seized by a revelation that had been lying dormant in my brain for days. The shock of it actually felt like a blow to the chest.

  “Idiot!” I yelled into the empty office, and immediately called Randall Dodge, who by this time would likely devoutly wish he’d never met me.

  “Yes, Jackie,” he said, answering the phone.

  “Dude, can I borrow your satellite application? The one we played around with the other day?”

  “I can’t give you log-in rights. The millisecond the system sees your IP address, it’ll lock you out and cut me off. Forever. The deal is, you can trade, but you don’t share.”

  “Okay, can I come over there and pretend I’m you?”

  It took a while for him to answer, but not because he was considering the proposition. It always took him longer than most to respond to questions. I took it as a Shinnecock thing. Rapid responses were undignified.

  “Sure. When?”

  “Tomorrow in the A.M.,” I said.

  “Bring ham and cheese.”

  * * *

  A mighty storm might have been roaring toward us, and I might have been totally unprepared for the consequences, and it was surely gray and cold and wretched outside, but for all that, my heart was warm with eager anticipation. I had a plan for the next day, one I could see unfolding in my mind’s eye. I had a theory, and a track to run on until that theory was proven right or wrong, and that was all I needed to be a whole person—a cheerful, anxious, unrelenting person.

  18

  I brought five different types of croissant and enough coffee to float a battleship. Randall was ready with a relatively clear and well-lit workspace waiting for me, the satellite program booted up and hovering over Southampton Village.

  “Does this thing work at night?” I asked, sitting down in front of the monitor.

  “It’s just a weather satellite,” he said. “No night vision. That’s NSA stuff. I wouldn’t be sneaking into their servers. That’s instant black helicopters overhead, commandos at the door. And then I disappear.”

  “We don’t disappear people.”

  “We don’t? Excellent news.”

  He gave me a quick tutorial on how to move laterally and zoom in and out by using a little joystick. It wasn’t much different from Google Earth, just in real time. In a few moments I was up in Seven Ponds, and a few moments after that, I had Tad Buczek’s place filling the screen.

  It was disorienting, the proportions far different from how I’d calculated them on the ground. I reset my perceptions by starting at the head of the driveway, following it down the hill to the sharp turn, past the pergola, which was more sprawling than I realized, and then on to the main house. From there, I followed the drive to the staff house, which was farther away than I thought, and tucked up next to a stand of trees. Next to the staff house was a barn twice its size. At least I thought it was the staff house. There were other buildings nearby, rectangular boxes probably made of corrugated steel, and things I wasn’t sure about but assumed were part of the Metal Madness collection.

  “Can I jump out of this but keep it running, and go to another site?” I yelled to Randall, who was off in some other dark corner of the shop’s back room.

  He came over to me and tapped a few keys, then showed me how to get back again when I was ready. I went into Southampton Town’s property records and fished around the tax maps until I had Tad’s estate and the immediately adjacent properties, something I’d seen before, back when I was helping him torment his neighbors.

  It took me a bit to figure out how to print it out, but I couldn’t bear to bother Randall again. Now with the borders and existing structures delineated, I confirmed the location of the staff house and the storage barn. That was just the start, however. Using the satellite image, I drew the round Hamburger Hill on the tax map, along with two other large artificial mounds—one a rough square, the other S-shaped, like a fat snake. All were festooned with Tad’s madcap sculptures, which were impossible to identify precisely looking down on them from above. Except for the big sprinkler on Hamburger Hill, which looked just like a sprinkler you’d have in your backyard, with three spokes sticking out
from a round stand that looked far more uniform and refined from that distance.

  But there was something missing, or I just couldn’t make it out. I gave in and called Randall again.

  “Can you identify other buildings,” I pointed to the screen, “within these borders,” and I pointed to the tax map.

  He shooed me out of the chair and started working the controls, making me feel like we were in a flying saucer zinging above the property. He explained that the winter weather was both a boon and a curse. The leaves off the trees meant we could see under the canopy, but the dense snow cover smoothed out variation on the surface and hardened up shadows, reducing depth of field. I acknowledged all that without really knowing what he was talking about.

  “I think that’s it,” he finally said, pointing to a blob on the screen. He continued to play with the resolution until there was no more resolving to be had. I looked at it with skepticism and squinted eyes. But then, magically, it was there.

  “Don’t tell me those little black dots are logs fallen off the pile,” I said.

  “That’s nothing. The NSA satellites can see a zit on the end of your nose.”

  This time I shoved him out of the command chair and took over the controls. I zoomed back out.

  “Son of a bitch,” I said, pointing at the blob. “Do you see what I see?”

  He leaned over me, his mass a little intimidating, his smell masculine and sweetly foreign at the same time.

  “I don’t.”

  “Here’s the staff house,” I said. “Here’s the woodshed. Now, here’s Hamburger Hill. What do you see, or don’t see?”

  “They aren’t in a row?” he asked.

  “Hardly. They represent points on a triangle. If Franco was going to see how Tad was doing with the woodshed, why travel forty-five degrees from the destination to get there? Focus in on the woodshed. What else do you see?”

  Randall took over the controls and zoomed in on the rectangular building.

  “The roof,” he said. “It’s crinkly.”

  “Which means what?”

  “It’s caved in.”

  “Why has everybody missed this?” I asked. “Why did I miss it?”

  “Because it was cold and snowy, and thus too difficult to walk the scene, and even if it wasn’t, assumptions trip you up every time,” said Randall.

  “Ain’t that the truth.”

  I spun around in the chair and looked up at him, miles above me. “Didn’t you tell me this was all recorded and you could go back about a year and look? Can I go back to before Tad was killed, and the days after?”

  He stared at me with that damn Indigenous Peoples’ poker face. I wanted to tell him, Don’t you know that American women of European origin can’t survive without immediate emotional feedback? Do you think virtual elves are any different? Do you want to live your whole life alone in a cave?

  “You can’t, but I can, though not without asking,” he said. “I’m sure my friend will give me the links. It’s very easy on his end. Everything’s time-stamped. Write down the dates and times, and I’ll give him a shout.”

  I wrote down a wish list, telling Randall I would be most happy with the dates I’d circled and starred. He watched me in silence.

  “I admire your persistence,” he said, taking the note. “I think I tend to give up at the first hint of resistance. Maybe that’s why I spend so much time alone in the dark.”

  I pretended that he hadn’t read my mind and went back to studying the Buczek compound. I wondered, if Franco wasn’t heading for the woodshed when he tripped over Tad’s body, where was he heading? Granted, it was in the middle of a raging blizzard, but Franco had worked there long enough to know the basic lay of the land.

  I traced the line from the staff house to Hamburger Hill, then extended it forward in a straight line. The trajectory took me past the pergola, which was down the hill, and directly into another odd lump on the satellite image, one hard against the property line with the neighbors to the southeast. I zoomed in and saw what I thought I saw, though I needed Randall for confirmation.

  “It’s another building,” he said, staring at the screen. “A little smaller than the woodshed, bigger than a bread box. You can mark it as a waypoint on your smartphone, which you can use to walk there from the road. It’s only about fifty yards in. Though you might need snowshoes if this damn weather keeps up.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Why not. You’re amazing. Did you contact Urszula?”

  Another long, suspenseful silence.

  “I did,” he said. “She’s a stimulating person. Thank you.”

  “Don’t mean to pry.”

  “Yes you do.”

  “Does she know you’re not a dwarf? Not that there’s anything wrong with dwarfs.”

  “She knows my height. But I didn’t tell her I’m red, white, and black.”

  “Who cares about that? You’re a good-looking man. Send a pic. Did she send you hers?”

  “I’m glad you don’t want to pry,” he said.

  “What does she look like? Don’t you want to know?”

  “She looks like her avatar. Ears are just a little less pointy.”

  I slapped him on the shoulder.

  “Wow, that means she’s really pretty. I knew it,” I said. “Did she tell you where she lives? New Britain, Connecticut. A hop, skip, and a jump.”

  “Four and a half hours by ferry. Less than that if you drive, without traffic.”

  “Could be a lot worse.”

  “You missed the part about Native Americans being very private, dignified people?”

  “Pshaw,” I said, my favorite word ever since I heard it from Saline Swaitkowski Lumsden, former medical student and psychiatric nurse. Proper preparation for a career in domestic service in the Buczek household?

  * * *

  I hadn’t meant to call on Paulina again, but given the conversation with Saline after the funeral, it seemed essential. So as soon as I left Randall’s, I headed directly for her condo. Even if I was a person who called ahead, it wouldn’t have been necessary. Paulina was a homebody, and who wouldn’t be with such a stunning home to be a body in?

  “Jacqueline, what a pleasure,” she said, though not too convincingly. I stood on her doorstep trying to look cold and in need of immediate shelter. After a brief hesitation, she let me in.

  “Sorry to bother you again, Paulina.” I wasn’t. “But some new stuff came up and you’re the only person who has the intelligence to help me.”

  This was a manipulative thing to say, given the inflated regard she had for her own brainpower. That I was using the word “intelligence” to mean hidden information meant I wasn’t lying, though that probably wouldn’t stand up under divine judgment.

  I sat down in a chair on the other side of the room from the Clock before she had a chance to seat me. I pulled off my coat and tried to look fixed in place. She was forced to turn another battleship of a living room chair about forty degrees so we could talk to each other without spraining our necks.

  “Wasn’t it a beautiful service?” Paulina said before I had a chance to start grilling her.

  “It was. I love Father Dent.”

  “As a priest,” she said. Just making sure.

  I refused to dignify that.

  “You must have been pleased with the turnout,” I said.

  She obviously was. She leaned in toward me the way Saline did to deliver intimate information in a secretive way, even though we were the only people in the room.

  “Did you see that the Chicago Buczeks were there? Flew into Islip. Five of them. They’ve done very well. Limousine service. Not as well as Tad, of course. They don’t get along with the Long Island Buczeks, all of us with dirt under our nails and bad table manners.”

  “But it’s nice they came to pay their respects,” I said, hoping to keep things on an even keel.

  “I suppose,” said Paulina.

  “I wanted to ask you about Saline’s medical-school career,” I said
before the conversation trotted off in another direction. “What happened?”

  Paulina adjusted her perch on the chair, which looked impossibly uncomfortable. Which it obviously was. This gave me some perverse pleasure watching her try to look otherwise.

  “Who told you about that?” she asked.

  “She did.”

  “Really.”

  Paulina looked offended that Saline had shared a key piece of suppressed information without her permission.

  “Everyone knew the Swaitkowskis were a bunch of smartypants, including Papa, who could have been anything he wanted to but chose to take over the farm. He’d say, ‘You can’t walk away from a hundred years of tradition.’”

  “Sounds like Saline gave it a try.”

  Paulina scrunched around in her seat and pulled at the hem of her skirt, which was at least a size too small.

  “Papa’s father didn’t believe in educating girls. He said that every woman who graduated from college meant one less job for a man. This wouldn’t be a very popular thing to say in these times.” You got that right, I thought. “So she made it as far as she could on scholarships, first to SUNY Kings County, where she majored in agriculture, which was something her father at least understood. Then to New Amsterdam, which really set off a bomb. Even then, medical school was very expensive. Papa tried to help, but he was a young man just starting out with me and little Peter, darling boy.”

  The moment quivered over the vast empty pain that was our missing Pete, but she recovered just in time and went on. She leaned toward me again and lowered her voice, telegraphing the nature of what was to come.

  “But then halfway through medical school, she moved back in with Papa’s parents and got into bed and stayed there for an entire year. One whole year, with the shades pulled, and she didn’t even eat, just drank fruit juice. I tried to get her to talk to me, but she’d just lie there. Her mother told me it was a nervous breakdown. Papa’s mother died during all this, and she still didn’t stir. She was such a big, strong girl, I thought she was going to wither away.”